호텔 인디고 더럼 바이 IHG

We stayed for 3 nights. Our train journey was delayed so we arrived some 4 hours later than planned, tired and fed up. The reception area is very underwhelming, situated to the side of the hotel right by a cafe. It doesn’t deliver any kind of impressive welcome which is a shame for such an imposing building and we couldn’t help but think it would have been better placed more centrally. For note receptionists, if your guests say in advance they would like a ‘quiet room’ and then remind you of this when they are checking in (and the hotel is not full!), then putting them right by the car park next to where the delivery vans arrive before 6 am and with an inter connecting room when they aren’t with another group, is probably not the best idea! So, do watch out for this when checking in! The sound proofing is not brilliant and we could certainly hear the tv in the room next door to us very clearly and were woken at 5.45 am on the Monday by a lot of banging and clattering that went on for about 30 mins. The hotel itself is large and very imposing and there is lots of marble and tile everywhere. The rooms are similarly very darkly decorated and with terrible lighting which adds to the sense of darkness. We felt that, whilst they are clearly trying to stick to the Victorian them, some lighter colours in the bedroom and better lighting wouldn’t have gone amiss. The room was a nice size though albeit the bed was probably the most uncomfortable we have ever slept in when staying in a hotel. Not sure why the mattress needed to be quite so firm and took us back to our early futon days as students. The room was well kitted out though and the nespresso machine a nice touch. Slippers and robes would be a nice extra touch. Breakfast was excellent and we definitely worth having. We ate twice at the Marco Pierre restaurant and, whilst the food was not exceptional, it was fine. Service however was very hit and miss. The first night we had the amazing Lindsay who we would highly recommend but on our final night, when the restaurant was very empty, the service was really slow and we had to ask several times for some water. We also didn’t understand why the restaurant shares the bar with the hotel bar which is separate. It means that all drink orders have to go through the bar and can take ages to arrive. Saturday night there was an event on and they ran out of ice and some drinks. It also meant you had to wait ages for a drink. The hotel should definitely have separate pop up bar areas for those in the council room having an event rather than having the guests (lots of students judging by the gowns) taking over the bar. We could barely get out of the hotel to go out for dinner as they were all over the steps smoking. So overall a mixe bag - some good parts and others not so good. Durham is short on decent hotels so this is probably still the best place to stay but it certainly isn’t ‘fabulous’ or ‘exceptional’ as some of the reviews we had read said before booking. Thankfully we were on a deal so the overall price including breakfast was pretty reasonable but, if we had paid the usual overnight rate, we would have been disappointed.